Brian Dickerson: America's red line has a fuzzy history

September 8, 2013

US President Barack Obama answers questions during his news conference at the G-20 Summit in St. Petersburg, Russia on Friday. Obama said that he plans to address Syria in a speech on Tuesday. / Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo

Detroit Free Press

Related Links

In his campaign to muster foreign and domestic support for a missile attack on Syria, President Barack Obama has depicted the U.S. government as merely the would-be enforcer of a taboo recognized by civilized peoples across the globe.

“I didn’t set a red line,” the president protested last week when a reporter asked whether military reprisals were necessary to preserve Obama’s credibility after he warned that his government would not tolerate the use of chemical weapons. “The world set a red line.”

No matter how sincerely Obama believes that the use of such weapons is immoral, he’s being disingenuous when he suggests those sentiments are universal. And it wasn’t long ago that one of Obama’s predecessors recognized that Iraq’s deployment of sarin gas might end its long-running war with Iran on terms favorable to the U.S.

In a report that has complicated America’s efforts to claim the moral high ground in its dispute with President Bashar al-Assad and his allies in Moscow and Teheran, Foreign Policy magazine last week laid out persuasive evidence that the Reagan administration not only tolerated but facilitated “a series of nerve gas attacks far more devastating than anything Syria has seen” late in the Iraq-Iran war.

The report by journalists Shane Harris and Matthew M. Aid marshals declassified CIA documents to show that the U.S. military and intelligence communities obtained hard evidence as early as 1983 that the Iraqi government had used mustard gas and sarin repeatedly in offensives against Iranian forces.

“As Iraqi attacks continue and intensify, the chances increase that Iranian forces will acquire a shell containing mustard agent with Iraqi markings,” the agency worried in a top secret memo circulated in November of that year. “Tehran would take such evidence to the U.N. and charge U.S. complicity in violating international law.”

A distasteful expedient

The Reagan administration, which was eager to see Iraq prevail in its war with Iran, saw no percentage in bringing Iraq’s war crimes to the attention of international authorities itself. But White House misgivings about Saddam Hussein’s promiscuous use of chemical weapons did put the kibosh on a Pentagon plan to share military intelligence with Iraq — at least until 1987, when U.S. satellite images showed Iranian forces massing for an offensive against a particularly vulnerable point in the Iraqi defense lines.

Worried that the Iranians would exploit the weak point to capture Iraq’s second-largest city and win the war, the Reagan administration authorized the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency to begin providing Saddam’s army with what retired Air Force Col. Rick Francona described as “targeting packages.” This notwithstanding the CIA’s prescient concern that the Iraqis would use the information to launch new chemical attacks against Iran.

Harris and Aid describe Iraq’s subsequent sarin gas assaults on Iranian positions as “some of the most gruesome chemical weapons attacks ever launched,” and they convincingly argue that the declassified U.S. documents they discovered are “tantamount to an official American admission of complicity” in those attacks.

That was then

Obama wasn’t the commander-in-chief when the events described by Harris and Aid took place, and he is responsible for only half of the double standard exposed by their scoop. (Reagan, it should be noted, was every bit as adept as Obama at framing American foreign policy as part of a larger moral crusade; it was he who described the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” in a speech delivered not long before his Defense Department helped Saddam’s troops pinpoint where to aim their deadly nerve agents.)

Nor does the fact that the U.S. ignored or abetted a previous despot’s use of chemical weapons mean that it is obligated to extend the same courtesy to Syria’s President Assad. Obama’s pointed query to opponents of punitive action against Assad — the president says they should ask themselves whether they want to live in a world where cornered dictators enjoy license to wield such weapons with impunity — is still a good one.

But the history of U.S. complicity in chemical attacks on Iran does make it difficult for Obama to distinguish Russian President Vladimir Putin’s disingenuous denials and cold strategic calculations from those of Obama’s predecessor. In framing the case for intervention in Syria, Obama eventually will have to confront his own country’s inconsistent posture toward the use of chemical weapons, and explain why what was expedient in 1988 has become morally untenable in 2013.